Saturday, June 14, 2014

Adam Phillips and I see psychoanalysis in roughly the same
way. Counting among the best psychoanalyst/writers Phillips defends its
practice. I am no longer a psychoanalyst and no longer defend it.

Psychoanalysis provides
what I would call a religious experience for unbelievers. In some cases, especially
in France and Argentina, it offers access to what I would call a
pseudo-religion.

Phillips understands well that:

… Freud
was writing in a long spiritual, religious tradition of crisis writing.

Phillips has not joined the great Lacanian cult, so he
limits himself to the notion that psychoanalysis brings people into touch with the poetry of
life.

I agree that this is a type of spiritual or religious
experience, but art does not provide access either to a religion or a
pseudo-religion. Being a member of the audience at a play is not the same as
being a member of a religious group attending a religious service.

Surely, great art might sustain and promote religion. A walk
through almost any museum in Italy will prove the point. But, you can
experience art without belonging to a religion.

This means, as Phillips and I have both argued, independently,
that psychoanalysis is more like poetry than science, that it does not cure or
even, at its best, pretend to cure, and that no one can really say that it
works.

I read
psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don’t have to worry about whether it is true or
even useful, but only whether it is haunting or moving or intriguing or
amusing—whether it is something I can’t help but be interested in.

In other words, psychoanalysis, like art, exists to
entertain. It does not need to be true. It does not need to be useful. It needs
to provoke the kinds of emotions you feel when you are watching a play in the
theatre.

As I pointed out, psychoanalysis has never had any use for
progress. A practice that is based on regression cannot really promote progress. Phillips explains:

One
advantage of thinking about psychoanalysis as an art, instead of a science, is
that you don’t have to believe in progress.

Phillips has also dispensed with the idea that insight will
cure. In fact, he has dispensed with the notion of cure, altogether:

The
discipline was practiced, though, as if we were going to make more and more
discoveries about human nature, as though psychoanalysis was going to become
more and more efficient, rather than the idea—which seemed to me to be more
interesting—that psychoanalysis starts from the position that there is no cure,
but that we need different ways of living with ourselves and different
descriptions of these so-called selves.

As a practicing psychoanalyst Phillips has to hedge his
bets. Yes, he says, psychoanalysis does not work, but that does not mean that
it does not help people:

The
great thing about the psychoanalytic treatment is that it doesn’t work in the
usual sense of work. I
don’t mean by this to avoid the fact that it addresses human suffering. I only
mean that it takes for granted that an awful lot of human suffering is simply
intractable, that there’s a sense in which character is intractable.

Again, you will find similar thoughts in religions. They also
offer consolations, but they also offer membership in a community. As it
happens, even, as we saw in yesterday’s post, socialization works… even for
bonobos.

The activities that make you a member of a community do work
for people. The best that psychoanalysis can do is offer membership in a
pseudo-religion, a cult.

Naturally, Phillips must tell his patients that treatment
might really mitigate their pain and cure their symptoms. Otherwise he would
put himself out of business. And yet, he hedges his bets:

Patients
come because they are suffering from something. They want that suffering to be
alleviated. Ideally, in the process of doing the analysis, they might find
their suffering is alleviated or modified, but also they might discover there
are more important things than to alleviate one’s suffering.

And I
don’t think the project is to make people feel better. Nor is it to make people
feel worse. It’s not to make them feel
anything. It’s simply to allow them to see what it is they do feel. And
then what redescription might change.

As I put it in my book, psychoanalysis has gotten itself to
the point where it is in the business of curing people of the belief that they
should be cured.

Does psychoanalysis provide any understanding about human
psychology? I have suggested it doesn’t. Phillips takes the same position:

In the
same way, a psychoanalysis bent on understanding people is going to be very limited.
It’s not about redescribing somebody such that they become like a character in
a novel. It’s really showing you how much your wish to know yourself is a
consequence of an anxiety state—and how it might be to live as yourself not
knowing much about what’s going on.

Here, I do not agree with Phillips when he says that
psychoanalysis does not try to recreate people as characters in fiction or
drama.

If the world is a stage, and if psychoanalysis is about
getting you in touch with life’s poetry, then you must end up living your life
as a character in a play.

Both Phillips and the interviewer agree, as I do, that psychoanalysis
has suffered a great decline of late.

The interviewer asks:

Do you
think that the great decline in the popularity of psychoanalysis has been a
good thing for psychoanalysis or a bad thing?

Phillips answers:

I think
it’s the best thing that could have happened to psychoanalysis, because it
means there is now no prestige in it, no glamour, no money, no public for it,
so you’ll only do it now if you really love it, if it really engages you. I
hope that the disaffection with it—even though it’s bad economically for people
who do it, obviously—will free people to work out what it is. It’s too new for
anyone to quite know what it is yet. I don’t at all feel that there was a
heyday and then it all fell apart. I think it’s beginning to dawn on some
people what it might be good for, that it might actually help us to live
differently, and in unforeseen ways.

His response reminds me of an old adage: when life serves
you lemons, make some lemonade.

Why is Freud's fake science what Psychology is about? Jung never doubted a religious aspect to psychology, like this quote for example:

"Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church."

This seems entirely false to me. Why would art exist to entertain? Is that a modern reduction? It's certainly not why people become artists.

One book I read is "The magic of ritual: Our need for Liberating Rites that Transform Our Lives & Our Communities." By Tom F. DriverI copied down a list he made and #6 is interesting:"Art is play done workfully, but ritual is work done playfully."

A fun reversal, but what does he mean? Whatever it is, entertainment isn't the purpose even if there is a necessary playful quality that can take things in without taking it all perfectly seriously as would be needed if we really knew what we were doing.

15 Maxims for the planning of Christian Rituals: 1. To do something while displaying the doing equals performance. 2. In theater, the display is paramount; In ritual, the doing. 3. A ritual is a "transformance" - a performance designed to change a situation. 4. Church ritual often becomes mere display, either just flashy or merely symbolic, with no hint of transforming power. 5. In ritual active participants should outnumber the passive ones. 6. Art is play done workfully, but ritual is work done playfully. 7. All ritual invokes power. A ritual is religious when those powers receive adoration. It is Christian when the powers are God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. 8. A Christian ritual "works" only when its participants are willing to make demands upon God. ("Ask and you shall receive.") 9. To be boring is to bear false witness. 10. To be sensational is to bear no witness at all. 11. Ritual loves not paper. 12. The form of a Christian ritual may be very traditional or very innovative or both at once, since form in ritual is nothing but technique, and substance is spirit. 13. Christian ritual is liminal and authentic when the people of God receive the spirit of God in the midst. ("The kingdom of God is among you.... Where two or three are gathered together, there am I....") 14. The liminality of ritual can be used by God to weaken the grip of oppressive powers. In fact, God has no other use for it. 15. Christian ritual is the opposite of servitude: It is the performance of freedom.

E.F. Schumacher offers some clarity on the nature of art in his book A guide for the perplexed, from the Wikipedia summary, calling art as entertainment or propaganda, but also suggests art has the power to communicate truth, if you can explain what that means. And I think he means something like "living truth" more than logical truth. Science can tell you object objective truth like the law of gravity, but can't touch on the truth of subjective experience and how to interpret experience in a way that leads to harmony and order versus interpretations that lead to chaos and disorder.

Like Dickens' Christmas Carol it literary art, and it is clear propaganda (more than entertainment), suggesting ever more strongly a living truth of what true wealth of community can looks like compared to the hoarded wealth of a cynic with a closed heart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed#Art

Schumacher in a digression from his main argument discusses the nature and importance of art. He notes that there is considerable confusion about the nature and meaning of art; but argues that this confusion dissipates when one considers art with relation to its effect on human beings. Most art fits into two categories. If art is designed to primarily affect our feelings then it is entertainment; while if art is primarily designed to affect our will then it is propaganda.

Great art is a multi-faceted phenomenon, which is not content to be merely propaganda or entertainment; but by appealing to man's higher intellectual and emotional faculties, it is designed to communicate truth. When entertainment and propaganda are transcended by, and subordinated to the communication of truth, art helps develop our higher faculties and that makes it great.